Kalpana Kalpana (Editor)

The Last Times

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Type
  
Newspaper

Publisher
  
Charles Plymell

Founder(s)
  
Charles Plymell

Format
  
Tabloid/Alternative newspaper

Founded
  
1967; 50 years ago (1967) in San Francisco

Ceased publication
  
1967; 50 years ago (1967)

The Last Times was a tabloid underground newspaper published in San Francisco in 1967 by beatnik poet and printer Charles Plymell. It lasted only two issues, but included work by William Burroughs, Claude Pelieu, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski.

The Last Times featured William Burroughs' text Day the Records Went Up (a version of which later appeared in Evergreen Review, November 1968), Claude Pelieu's Do It Yourself & Dig It, Allen Ginsberg's poem "Television Was A Baby Crawling Toward that Deathchamber" (also published in Ginsberg's book T.V. Baby Poems , London: Cape Goliart Press, 1967), and a Charles Bukowski column, collected in his Notes of a Dirty Old Man, reprinted from the Los Angeles-based underground journal Open City.

The Last Times #1 and 2 also contained articles by French avant-gardist Jean-Jacques Lebel and Man Suicided by Society by Antonin Artaud, translated by Mary Beach, Plymell's mother-in-law. Issue #1 also contains the first Plymell printed work of R. Crumb that Plymell had "lifted" from the second issue of Yarrowstalks (a Philadelphia-based underground newspaper).

Plymell subsequently earned a bit of immortality in the underground press by publishing only the first printing of Robert Crumb's Zap Comix #1, which Don Donahue took over from Plymell when he purchased his Multilith 1250 printing press soon after.

References

The Last Times Wikipedia